Your company’s identity is far more than just letterhead, logo, and business cards.  It requires an end-to-end communications approach with verbal, written, and visual messages that target the customers you want to reach, ensure consistency in all marketing materials, and keep your identity program on track.

In Stand Out from the Crowd, marketing expert Jay Lipe offers entrepreneurs, small-business owners, and marketers the necessary tools to implement a comprehensive company identity strategy.  With clear-cut action steps, case studies, and visual examples, Lipe highlights the best ways to build a reputation and make a lasting impression.

 

 Jay Lipe Interview [23:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Welcome to the mind-to the world-of Fake Steve Jobs. Fake Steve the counterintuitive management guru: “Obviously we can’t literally put our employees’ lives at risk. But we have to make them feel that way.” Fake Steve the celebrity hobnobber: “I like Bono. He’s the only person I know who’s more self-absorbed than I am.” Options is the book that had the critics howling-with laughter:

 

 Dan Lyons Interview [21:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ever wonder what it means when the Fed raises interest rates? Or why there are occasional fears of inflation? To the rescue comes this simplified and chatty nontextbook textbook. Using words rather than math, it makes economics accessible, comprehensible and appealing. Wheelan, the Economist’s Midwest correspondent, breezily explains the big picture, including finance, capital markets, government institutions and more. His informal style belies the sophisticated and scholarly underpinnings of his subject. Wheelan champions the often-maligned science: “Economics should not be accessible only to the experts. The ideas are too important and too interesting.” Well before book’s end, highly persuasive yet simply illustrated concepts sway the reader. Complex ideas are demystified and made clear, using familiar examples, such as the price of sweatshirts at the Gap. A chapter on financial markets compares a grapefruit and ice cream fad diet with get-rich-quick schemes. (He wryly offers the mantra “Save. Invest. Repeat.”) Similarly, an explanation of interest rates compares them to “rental rates,” an easy-to-grasp concept. And to convey what the major international institutions do, Wheelan writes: “If the World Bank is the world’s welfare agency, then its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the fire department responsible for dousing international financial crises.” Wheelan’s simplicity does not mask the detailed encapsulation of complicated issues, such as relative wealth, globalization and the importance of human capital. He smartly shows that while economic consequences can be global, they are also a part of everyday life.

 

 Charles Wheelan Interview [18:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download